Until then, we’ll have to make do with such splendid books as: The Bush Tragedy by Jacob Weisberg; Craig Ungor’s The Fall of the House of Bush ; Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks; Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side; State of Denial by Bob Woodward; Richard A. Clarke’s Against All Enemies; and The Man Who Pushed America to War by Aram Roston.
The latter takes on the rather astonishing Ahmed Chalabi and his role in the creation of the Iraq War. It was Chalabi, a man of many descriptions who inspired the neoconservatives to sell the war to those cherry-picking enthusiasts: Bush/Cheney & Co. The book, written by Aram Roston, is a fascinating look at a man who has been an exile, fraudster, statesman, banker, math whiz, gourmand and esthete. Chalabi, in addition, is a convicted felon, fugitive from justice in Jordan, and ally of the Iranian government.
Revelations are plentiful in the Chalabi expose. Among them are: the inside story of his pre-war propaganda operations and their cost to American taxpayers; how the CIA used private, for-profit companies owned by Chalabi or closely connected to him to funnel funds to the Iraqi National Congress; details of his criminal conviction because of the collapse of his Petra Bank in Jordan; and Chalabi’s connection to Iran’s top intelligence official while selling the war to our government officials.
Not since the creation of Sammy Glick in Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? has the reading public been confronted by anything approaching the real life chutzpah of Chalabi who, after a series of nefarious successful maneuvers in the run-up to war, found himself the special guest of the first lady as President Bush gave his State of the Union address in January, 2004.
Author Roston is an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter whose credits include heading up an NBC Nightly News unit, CNN correspondent, and police reporter in New York City. Roston’s skills gained while investigating white collar crime and corruption serve him well in pinpointing Chalabi’s role while working with the warmongering neocons.
Chalabi’s cultivation of journalists including Judith Miller of the New York Times often worked to stunning effect. His legendary charisma and charm first enabled him to draw attention to an Iraqi civil engineer who spread misinformation about the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction. With Chalabi building a feeding frenzy among reporters including Miller, it was no surprise to the neocons when the Times carried a story under Miller’s byline drawing attention to the engineer’s unfounded claim that he had visited 20 biological and chemical sites.
Among the shadowy characters who populate the compulsively readable book are: James Woolsey, CIA Director and an enabler in giving the WMD claims traction; the very high risk Wayne Drizen who first appears as a potential buyer of a major Nevada house of prostitution and whose later slick dealings with Chalabi are reminiscent of contemporary Wall Street maneuverings; Douglas Feith, now notorious for his activities in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans set up by Donald Rumsfeld to prepare for the Iraq War; and L. Paul Bremer, America’s clueless overseer of much of the confusion in Baghdad. The battles between Bremer and Chalabi are fierce with the latter’s chutzpah leading to his being named to Iraq’s Governing Council while continuing the old family business as an international banker and, briefly, raiser of his own army. Chalabi is truly astonishing and could probably explain the Wall Street mess to those trying to understand it.
While money, art treasures, other valuables and arms easily vanish in Iraq, a conservative estimate of government funding for Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress is $59 million over 11 years. Included is an estimated $20 million from the CIA secret budget in the early 1990s although that figure may be far more.
Those who have been around Chalabi for any length of time either like or dislike him intensely. Perhaps the most accurate observation about him may be found in Roston’s epilogue suggesting “there’s no doubt that he’s a leader who inspired disparate followers to do extraordinary, sometime calamitous things. He literally changed history. And like so many leaders, he was perhaps delusional, as well, possessed of a strange sense of his own grandeur and destiny. He’s Don Quixote and Captain Ahab and Elmer Gantry all rolled into one contradictory and tragic bundle.”
# # # #
Comments